Cloud versus cloud: A guided tour of Amazon, Google, AppNexus, and GoGrid

Cloud computing offerings differ in depth, breadth, style, and fine print; beneath the heady metaphor lurk familiar pitfalls, complex pricing, and many questions

 

Google App Engine
Google's App Engine is a polar opposite of Amazon's offering. While you get root privileges on Amazon, you can't even write a file in your own directory with the App Engine. In fact, it's not even clear that you get your own directory, although that's probably what's happening under the hood. Google ripped the file write feature out of Python, presumably as a quick way to avoid security holes. If you want to store data, you must use Google's database.

The result of all of these limitations is not necessarily a bad thing. Google has stripped Web applications down to a core set of features and built up a pretty good framework for delivering them. I was able to write a simple application with several hundred lines of Python (cutting and pasting from Google's documentation) in less than an hour. Google offers some nice tools for debugging the application on your own machine.

Deploying this application to the cloud should have taken a few seconds, but it was held up by Google's insistence that I fork over my cell phone number and wait around for a text message that tests the number. When my message didn't show up for several hours after retrying, I switched to a friend's phone and finally activated my account.

Google insists on linking your App Engine account to both your cell phone and your Gmail account because -- well, I don't know. I think it's to track down the scammers, spammers, pharmers, phishers, and other fraudsters, but it starts to feel a bit creepy. Maybe it will help customer service and allow them to field support requests with answers like, "Your cell phone shows you filed this report from a location with a liquor license. Your e-mail suggests you're coding while waiting for Chris to get off of work. We suggest going home, sleeping this off, and then it will take you only a few seconds to find the endless loop on line 432 of main.py. BTW, Chris is lying to you and is really out with someone else."

The best users for the App Engine will be groups, or most likely individual developers, who want to write a thin layer of Python that sits between the user and the database. The API is tuned to this kind of job. In the future, Google may add more features for background processing and other services such as lightweight storage, but for now, that's the core strength of the offering. [ See the QuickTime video. ]

The Bottom Line

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Amazon, amazon.com/ec2

Preview

Cost: 10 cents per hour for a "small instance" (1.7GB of memory, 160GB of instance storage), 15 cents per gigabyte of data storage per month, 10 to 17 cents per gigabyte of data transferred Platforms: Linux-based systems Bottom Line: Amazon EC2 offers a great collection of tools and experimental offerings that is rapidly expanding. Already offering the broadest set of cloud services by far, Amazon supports a wide range of application platforms including JBoss, and active development shows the cloud changing day by day. Cons include endless cutting and pasting for the command-line interface, and the shared storage (S3) is relatively expensive for low-grade data such as log files.

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The Bottom Line

Google App Engine Google, google.com/appengine/

Preview

Cost: About 5 million free page views. After that, 10 to 12 cents per hour of a CPU core, 15 to 18 cents per gigabyte of storage per month, and 9 to 13 cents per gigabyte of data transferred. Platforms: Any Python 2.5 Web application that operates in a sandbox that excludes actions such as writing to the file system. Bottom Line: App Engine makes life easy for programmers who code simple database front ends in Python, though the API is deliberately limited. There are no background threads, files, or other crutches. It's all database, all the time, but only a simplified database at that. The pricing model -- based on squirrelly metrics such as CPU megacycles -- may make costs difficult to anticipate. An application dashboard offers clean views of performance.

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The Bottom Line

GoGrid GoGrid, gogrid.com

Preview

Cost: 12 cents per hour of a CPU core. Load balancing, DNS, 500GB of storage, and incoming data transfers are free. Outbound data transfers cost 25 cents per gigabyte Platforms: CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Apache, PHP, MySQL, or Facebook; Windows Server 2003 with IIS, ASP.Net, SQL Server 2005 Bottom Line: GoGrid offers the widest range of machine images, including Windows systems. A clean, AJAX-based control panel makes it simple to get a sophisticated network up quickly and efficiently, and saves you the trouble of cutting and pasting IP addresses and other details. GoGrid doesn't offer many cloudlike features for database storage; you have to mirror the databases yourself. The company is still working on a way to freeze a machine instance so that you don't have to pay for it when it's not running.

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The Bottom Line

AppNexus AppNexus, appnexus.com

Preview

Cost: 22 cents per hour for a 2.83GHz server. High throughput NAS costs 50 cents per gigabyte per month, while archival storage costs significantly lower. Platforms: Linux-based systems Bottom Line: AppNexus is a way to share the cost of owning top-of-the-line enterprise tools. It makes load balancers and file storage systems available on a fractional basis, and it provides a content delivery network that spreads your static files throughout the Web. Cloudlike features are implemented with old-school metaphors like "shared file systems," which may be a good thing if you like the old transparency. The command-line interface is really made for Unix lovers.

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